This invention relates to retail fuel dispensers and more particularly, to a device that will allow a fuel dispenser to read standard bar coded data.
For more than a decade, retail fuel dispensers have included magnetic strip card readers for reading magnetic strip debit/credit cards. The magnetic strip cards are typically small plastic cards that contain a strip of magnetic material (i.e., magnetic data) that includes information such as an account number and a credit or debit facility (e.g., a bank).
However, many retailers, such as those used by various wholesale food clubs or video stores, have an established customer base that uses bar coded cards. Bar coded cards are also typically small plastic cards, but instead of having a magnetic strip, they contain bar codes (i.e. optical data) that identify a certain account with the retailer. These bar coded cards allow the retailers to provide many benefits, such as providing customers with frequent shopper awards, preventing unauthorized use, providing certain purchase discounts, and identifying an internal payment account.
A problem arises when these retailers, with an established customer base with bar coded cards, wish to sell fuel using conventional fuel dispensers. Since conventional fuel dispensers cannot read bar coded cards, one solution is for the retailers to provide their customers with magnetic strip cards for purchasing fuel in addition to the bar coded card already in use. However, such a solutions is not only expensive, it is undesirable for many customers to keep two cards for a single retailer.
Another solution is to require the customers to switch from the bar coded card to the magnetic strip card. This solution is impractical because so many bar coded cards are already in use and it would be very expensive to convert them. Also, many facilities of the retailers already include bar code readers that would require replacement.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method to easily adapt a conventional fuel dispenser and related facilities to accept bar coded cards in addition to or instead of magnetic strip cards.